Category Archives: Pop and rock

Goat Girl: ‘We’re seen as harmless because we’re not men’

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With a member diagnosed with cancer and their politics deepened by BLM, the south London indie quartet have reassessed their priorities ahead of their excellent second album

South London quartet Goat Girl were deep into making their second album when it became clear that something was very wrong with their youngest member, guitarist-vocalist Ellie Rose Davies. At the end of 2019, she had had lumps on her neck for some time, which eventually spread to both armpits. It wasn’t until the 23-year-old’s “fourth or fifth” trip to the doctors that she was finally referred for a blood test, then a biopsy. “By which time the cancer was at stage four,” she says.

Davies had Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the blood, and had to start a six-month course of chemotherapy immediately. “We were pretty worried because we knew it was getting worse,” says their bassist, Holly Mullineaux. They had been mixing the record with their producer, Dan Carey, when Davies got her results, “and we all just started crying”.

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Suzi Quatro: ‘At 70, I zip up the jumpsuit and feel like me’

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As a bass-playing, leather-clad lead singer, Quatro paved the way for a new generation of female rock stars in the 70s. She talks about fending off predatory men, carrying a knife for protection and why she still wears her famous jumpsuit

Suzi Quatro is remembering a “pivotal moment”. It was 1973, and the RAK Records boss, Mickie Most, asked her what she would like to wear to promote her wonderfully raucous single, Can the Can. “When I said leather, he said that was old-fashioned, but I stuck to my guns,” she recalls. Most relented, sketching a jumpsuit inspired by Jane Fonda’s character in the 1968 film Barbarella. “I went to the photo shoot in the jumpsuit and the photographer Gered Mankowitz said: ‘Suzi, give me that Suzi Quatro look.’ And all of a sudden, I had a look I didn’t know I had. I swear to God I didn’t know it was sexy until we got the photos back. He said: ‘Come and look.’ And I just went ‘Oh …’”

Can the Can rocketed to No 1, followed by smashes such as 48 Crash and Devil Gate Drive , numerous Top of the Pops appearances and 55m record sales to date.

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How we made: All Together Now by the Farm

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‘Pills were just starting to flow in Britain. We thought: “What will this sound like in a club with people off their heads?”’

The origins of All Together Now go back to 1981. Michael Foot had been the centre of tabloid outrage after wearing what the papers called a “donkey jacket” at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. He later revealed that it was an £800 coat from Harrods which the Queen Mother had actually complimented him on, but the outrage made me angry. I thought the soldiers in the trenches would be more annoyed with the top brass that sent them to the front than, decades later, a Labour party leader’s attire. I’d trained as a history teacher and this incident inspired me to read more about the first world war. I chanced upon an article about the unofficial truce in 1914, when British and German troops came out of the trenches to play football with each other for Christmas. I wrote a song called No Man’s Land and we recorded it for a John Peel session. A couple of years later Paul McCartney released Pipes of Peace, with the same theme. I thought: “Bastard!”

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Phil Spector brought joy to pop music – and misery to so many lives

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Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’ technique gave his artists’ music an infectious joie de vivre, but the man behind it was damaged, bitter and violent

Three years before his death in 2006, I interviewed Gene Pitney. Talk inevitably turned to Phil Spector. He had written Spector’s real breakthrough record – the Crystals’ 1962 No 1 He’s a Rebel – unequivocally one of the greatest singles in pop history, a perfect cocktail of soaring melody, echo-drenched production and Darlene Love’s exuberant vocal. A year before that, he’d sung Every Breath I Take, which, with its rumbling timpani, overload of backing vocals and dramatic orchestration, was one of the few early Spector productions to hint at the more-is-more Wall of Sound approach that would make him a legend. And, moreover, Spector was, as Pitney put it, “kind of a hot news item”: he was awaiting trial for murder.

Like a lot of people who knew Spector, Pitney seemed horrified yet oddly unsurprised at this turn of events, as if something like that was bound to happen sooner or later: the booze, the drugs, the evident instability, the obsession with guns and the history of violence towards women. Spector, he suggested, had been in trouble from the start. “I had dinner with him the first day he arrived in New York, and he said to me that his sister was in an asylum and she was the sane one in the family,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘Wow, where did that come from?’”

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Phil Spector, pop producer convicted of murder, dies aged 81

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Producer who revolutionised music in 1960s with his ‘wall of sound’ dies while serving sentence

Phil Spector, the music producer behind some of pop music’s biggest hits, has died aged 81 while serving a prison sentence for murder.

Media reports said Spector, who had been sentenced to 19 years to life for murdering the actor Lana Clarkson, died after being diagnosed with Covid-19 four weeks ago.

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On my radar: Jason Williamson’s cultural highlights

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The Sleaford Mods frontman on a favourite singer-songwriter, a hellish horror film and why he spends seven hours a day on Twitter

Jason Williamson, lead vocalist of English electronic punk music duo Sleaford Mods, was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire in 1970. He moved to Nottingham in 1995, where he began working with rock band Spiritualized and electronic duo Bent. In 2009, he met Andrew Fearn and they released the first Sleaford Mods album, Divide and Exit, in 2014. They have since been called “the voice of Britain” by their fans and “the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band” by Iggy Pop. Their latest album, Spare Ribs, is out now on Rough Trade Records. The band will tour the UK in late 2021.

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Sylvain Sylvain was the visionary eye of the New York Dolls’ storm

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The guitarist who never lost his defiant streak brought solidity and swashbuckling style to one of the 70s’ wildest bands

There is a story that Sylvain Sylvain liked to tell about his arrival in New York City. He was Sylvain Mizrahi then, a seven-year-old Syrian Jew whose family had fled Egypt for the US during the Suez crisis. “I was probably one of the last immigrants to sail into New York harbour to be greeted by the Statue of Liberty,” he recalled. “I would be standing there in my fucking brown shoes and people would say, ‘You speak English?’ I’d say no. They’d say, ‘Fuck you.’ The first words I learned when I got off the boat were ‘fuck you.’”

Related: Sylvain Sylvain, showboating guitarist of New York Dolls, dies aged 69

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Dave Grohl’s teenage obsessions: ‘I learned drums by arranging pillows on my floor’

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Ahead of the 10th Foo Fighters album, their frontman recalls the music and scenes that made him – from punk gigs in Chicago to sleeping on floors in Italian squats

Before I was a teenager, I started playing music in my bedroom by myself. I fell in love with the Beatles, then began to discover classic rock. I went from Kiss to Rush to AC/DC, but in 1983 I discovered punk rock music through a cousin in Chicago. My world turned upside down. My favourite bands were Bad Brains and Naked Raygun; I listened to Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. My introduction to live music came when my brother took me to a punk show in a small bar in Chicago. I didn’t have that festival/stadium/arena rock experience; I just saw four punk rock dudes on the stage, playing this fast three-chord music, with about 75 people in the audience climbing all over each other. It changed my life. One of the most prolific scenes in hardcore American punk rock was in Washington DC, just across the bridge [from Grohl’s home town of Springfield, Virginia]. So I started going to see bands like Minor Threat and Fugazi. By the time I was 14, I was cutting and dyeing my hair and wearing leather jackets. All I wanted to do was leave school, jump in a van and tour shitty basement clubs with my punk band.

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‘The music industry kills artists’: Damso, Belgium’s biggest rap star

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With multi-platinum No 1 albums including topics such as suicide and the psychology of paedophiles, the Congolese-Belgian MC has carved his own lane with total determination

‘The questions that I ask myself about death aren’t about dying, they’re about death in this life.” Damso doesn’t really do small talk. Engaging and magnetic even through a computer screen, the 28-year-old Congolese-Belgian rapper is sporting a flamboyant shirt and a considerable amount of jewellery as he ponders the nature of existence. “There are people who are alive, but live like they’re dead,” he says. “They don’t strive to go further. But I know life is really short because I’ve seen people die just like that, in the street. So this question speaks to me: how can we be absent from our own lives?”

This is Damso’s first interview for an English-speaking audience, but we barely mention any of the achievements his team send over to illustrate how successful he is. When his fourth album, QALF, dropped in September 2020 without a whisper of promotion, it generated 14m streams in 24 hours, making him the most streamed artist in the world that day. “The music won,” he says simply.

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Nick Kent: ‘I was in the right place at the right time, on the wrong drugs’

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The rock critic who revived British music writing at the NME in the 70s is back with his first novel – a caustic tale of rock megalomania

Nick Kent, who is as close as British music journalism ever came to producing a legend, finally stopped writing about rock in 2007. “There was really nothing around that sparked my imagination,” he tells me. “There was no mystery, and rock’n’roll needs mystery.”

So ended a singular odyssey that had begun 35 years earlier, in 1972, when Kent joined a then struggling NME and, within a year or two, had helped push its weekly readership to near the 300,000 mark. Back then, a tall, stick-thin fop in leather trousers, matching biker jacket, a dangling earring and eyeliner, Kent was as sartorially stylish and – to borrow one of his own phrases – as “elegantly wasted” as the dissolute rock stars he profiled. And he walked it like he talked it, hanging out with the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, befriending Iggy Pop, stepping out with Chrissie Hynde (briefly a fellow NME writer) and even playing guitar in a very early incarnation of the Sex Pistols.

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‘His life is a rebuke to cynicism’: what five years without David Bowie has taught us

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In his song Five Years, Bowie imagined a dying Earth. Five years on from his death, it seems to have come true – yet he continues to uplift us

On 11 January 2016, in pitch darkness, I turned on the radio at 7am and heard the news that David Bowie had died. I switched rapidly between stations hoping to find a parallel universe in which he was still alive, but there were only the halting voices of presenters choking back tears alongside snippets of Bowie’s incomparable musical world, collapsing into collective grief.

My first reaction was to think magically: “But he can’t be dead!” Bowie had just released his 25th album, Blackstar, only three days previously, on his 69th birthday. His official website had recently posted new photographs of him, sharp-suited and yelling playfully into the camera. Occasional news of what the critic Paul Morley called Bowie’s “cheering, ongoing life” – especially in the decade after Bowie suffered a heart attack on stage in 2004 – had been enough to reassure me and his millions of fans that he was still around. Not that he owed us anything, but a world that still had David Bowie in it couldn’t be all bad. And now he was gone from it.

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New Order’s 30 greatest tracks – ranked!

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With the 40th anniversary of their debut single approaching, we rate the band who blend dance and rock like no other

You can see why Movement is viewed less as New Order’s debut album than a footnote to Joy Division’s career – that is really what it is – but that doesn’t mean it is not good. The surges of The Him would have made a great Joy Division track; the lyrics, which attempt to understand the death in 1980 of Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s frontman, are powerful and heartbreaking.

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‘A legend in her own right’: Carolyn Franklin, Aretha’s forgotten sister

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She was a genius songwriter and singer but could never escape her sibling’s shadow – and died at just 43. Family and friends including Martha Reeves and Bettye Lavette celebrate the life of a cruelly overlooked artist

Some of the most remarkable footage of Aretha Franklin was taken in 1968, as she rehearses Ain’t No Way, written by her youngest sister, Carolyn. Diminutive and tomboyish in appearance, Carolyn is clearly in control of the session: she anchors the beat with a church clap, teaching her sister the melody while Aretha holds down chords on the piano. For the woman who ferociously demanded respect, Aretha appears meek, almost sheepish. Carolyn’s commanding presence and musicality are what shine.

Yet it was Aretha who would go on to become the Queen of Soul, and whose story will be depicted this year in the biopic Respect, while Carolyn has been mostly overlooked, known – if at all – for a few songwriting credits. Her life and career as a songwriter, backing vocalist and solo artist, though cut short, is one of frustrated opportunity, hidden identity and fantastic accomplishment.

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How You’ll Never Walk Alone came to define Liverpool FC’s spirit

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The Rodgers and Hammerstein number became a football anthem via the late Gerry Marsden, bringing euphoric determination to every era of Liverpool FC from Shankly to Klopp

“It never stops creating goosebumps,” is how Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp describes it. “It never stops feeling really special.”

Our team’s anthem – Gerry and the Pacemakers’ You’ll Never Walk Alone – was not the reason Klopp came to Liverpool, but he’s talked about the moment he first heard it ringing out around the ground, and how that reassured him that he’d made the right choice to move to Merseyside. Indeed, if you could condense Klopp’s entire philosophy into one song – sticking together when times get tough, trust in the abilities of others, a conviction that better days are ahead – it would be You’ll Never Walk Alone. It’s been the club’s anthem since it topped the UK charts in 1963, providing joy and comfort during the triumphs and tragedies of the decades that have followed. Fans are now mourning the death, at 78, of the man who sang it – Gerry Marsden.

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‘All that mattered was survival’: the songs that got us through 2020

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Butterflies with Mariah, Bronski Beat in the Peak District, Snoop Dogg on a food delivery ad … our writers reveal the tracks that made 2020 bearable

When it came to lockdown comfort listening, there was something particularly appealing about lush symphonic soul made by artists such as Teddy Pendergrass and the Delfonics. But there was one record I reached for repeatedly: Black Moses by Isaac Hayes, and particularly the tracks arranged by Dale Warren. Their version of Burt Bacharach’s (They Long to Be) Close to You is an epic, spinning the original classic into a nine-minute dose of saccharine soul. But their cover of Going in Circles, another Warren exercise in expansion, is their masterpiece, reimagining the Friends of Distinction original as a seven-minute arrangement with stirring strings and beatific backing vocals that builds into a story about lost love that transcends the genre’s usual parameters. A perfect, if slightly meta, balm for the repetitive lockdown blues. Lanre Bakare

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Patti Smith: ‘As a writer, you can be a pacifist or a murderer’

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As she prepares to ring in 2021 with a performance on screens at Piccadilly Circus, the punk poet explains why she’s optimistic amid the ‘debris’ of Trump’s years in office

Patti Smith talks about her first poetry performance – in 1971 at St Mark’s Church in New York’s Bowery – as if it were yesterday. “I remember everything,” she says over the phone from her home in New York. Smith was in her early 20s, working at a bookshop and living in the Chelsea Hotel with her then lover, the playwright Sam Shepard. She had attended poetry readings before, most of which put her into a deep sleep. “I wanted to do something that wasn’t boring,” she recalls. “Sam said that since I sang to myself all the time, I should try singing a song, or maybe do something with a guitar.” And so she called on the musician Lenny Kaye to provide “interpretative” noises on guitar while she half-read, half-sang her poems.

The show was an instant hit. “It seemed to make a big impression on people – which I really didn’t understand,” she says. The producer Sandy Pearlman approached her afterwards and suggested she front a rock band. She eventually took his advice, making the landmark album Horses in 1975, and an icon of American punk was born.

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‘Your worries disappear!’ East 17’s Tony Mortimer on discovering reading – as a 50-year-old

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Until lockdown hit the singer – who won an Ivor Novello for songwriting – had never read a full book. Now he has galloped through 70 and is writing his own. He talks about his life-enriching habit

Should the government ever need to hire a reading tsar to raise the country’s literacy skills, then they should look no further than Tony Mortimer. Sure, the former East-17 star had made it until almost 50 years of age without ever reading a novel – perhaps not ideal credentials for the role. But listening to him talk about the wonder of books, and the journey he’s been on since picking up his first one last March, is such a pleasure that I’m convinced he could sweep anyone along.

Mortimer is emblematic of the reading boom brought on by lockdown this year – Bloomsbury reported its best half-year profits in more than a decade – and his social media posts documenting his new hobby made national headlines, with sweet, awestruck tweets that proved to people that you’re never too old to embark upon a new, life-enriching project.

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Good Riddance 2020: the ultimate New Year’s Eve songs, as voted by you

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We asked you to help us create an epic end of year playlist to see out the bin fire that has been 2020. After nearly 10,000 votes, here it is

We asked you, Guardian readers, to nominate the song you’d want on the ultimate New Year’s Eve playlist: one that represents the year we’ve had, the year we’re hoping for, or just the way we’ll feel (and the words we’ll be screaming) at midnight. Then, 9,534 of you voted on them.

It was all over, though, once the Mountain Goats got involved. Their popular 2011 track This Year was sitting at No 3 until the band discovered it and tweeted about this fact with a shameless plea for votes.

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Pop in 2020: an escape into disco, folklore and nostalgia

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Amid the chaos of the pandemic and with the future so uncertain, the pop music that resonated was glittery, danceable and comfortingly familiar

Pop music has the ability to be more reactive to current events than ever. Advances in technology mean that the famously swift musical responses of rock’s past – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Ohio, in the US Top 20 within weeks of the Kent State massacre that inspired it; the hastily cobbled-together tributes to Elvis Presley and John Lennon that appeared in the charts in the wake of their deaths – should theoretically look tardy. If an artist is so minded and inspired, they could write, record and release a song that reacts to current events overnight.

In 2020, there was a torrent of reactive tracks released in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests: YG’s FTP, Lil’ Baby’s The Bigger Picture, Stevie Wonder’s Can’t Put It in the Hands of Fate, HER’s I Can’t Breathe, the two acclaimed double albums released by the mysterious British collective Sault. Even the Killers reworked their 2019 anti-Trump track Land of the Free to reference Floyd’s death. But if anyone was expecting something similar to happen as a result of Covid-19 – a rash of unexpected new releases ruminating on the strangeness and anxieties of life in a pandemic or sternly admonishing politicians for their mishandling of the crisis – 2020 will have proved a crashing disappointment. They didn’t happen in any quantity, unless you count the well-intentioned but musically ghastly burst of charity singles that proliferated during the spring lockdown, or the equally abysmal anti-lockdown tracks released by Van Morrison and Ian Brown, rock’s own tinfoil-hatted Laurel and Hardy. The music that did appear unexpectedly, from artists keen to put the time on their hands to creative use, largely avoided the subject of the pandemic entirely: Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Evermore, Charli XCX’s How I’m Feeling Now, Paul McCartney’s McCartney III.

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